Nietzsche’s Corps/e: Aesthetics, Politics, Prophecy, or, the Spectacular Technoculture of Everyday Life (Post-Contemporary Interventions) (Paperback)

by Geoff Waite (Author), Stanley Fish (Series Editor), Fredric Jameson (Series Editor) "Nietzsche's position is the only one outside of communism..." (more)
Key Phrases: esoteric semiotics, evnukh dushi, illocutionary strategies, Eternal Recurrence of the Same, Nietzsche Industry, World War (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Review
"Waite provides a critical history of Nietzsche reception as well as an original argument about Nietzssche's style and purpose." --Modern Language Review, 94.1, 1999 "As Nietzscheans are virtually all trying to celebrate Nietzsche for whatever their particular cause may be, Waite exposes both Nietzsche and these causes to be questionable and wrongheaded. Attacking both the source and the consequences of the ideas that move through the writings of this difficult philosopher, he has worked through the masses of material - published and unpublished - with a thoroughness and precision that would put virtually everyone in the field to shame. This is an important achievement." Cyrus Hamlin, Yale University "New, original, and stimulating Nietzsche's Corps/e was born with these words emblazoned on its wrapper. Waite's scholarship is dazzlingly superior. His study exemplifies intellectual and political passion, scholarly range, and an altogether justified audacity." Stanley Corngold, Princeton University

Product Description
Appearing between two historical touchstones—the alleged end of communism and the 100th anniversary of Nietzsche’s death—this book offers a provocative hypothesis about the philosopher’s afterlife and the fate of leftist thought and culture. At issue is the relation of the dead Nietzsche (corpse) and his written work (corpus) to subsequent living Nietzscheanism across the political spectrum, but primarily among a leftist corps that has been programmed and manipulated by concealed dimensions of the philosopher’s thought. If anyone is responsible for what Geoff Waite maintains is the illusory death of communism, it is Nietzsche, the man and concept.
Waite advances his argument by bringing Marxist—especially Gramscian and Althusserian—theories to bear on the concept of Nietzsche/anism. But he also goes beyond ideological convictions to explore the vast Nietzschean influence that proliferates throughout the marketplace of contemporary philosophy, political and literary theory, and cultural and technocultural criticism. In light of a philological reconstruction of Nietzsche’s published and unpublished texts, Nietzsche’s Corps/e shuttles between philosophy and everyday popular culture and shows them to be equally significant in their having been influenced by Nietzsche—in however distorted a form and in a way that compromises all of our best interests.
Controversial in its “decelebration” of Nietzsche, this remarkable study asks whether the postcontemporary age already upon us will continue to be dominated and oriented by the haunting spectre of Nietzsche’s corps/e. Philosophers, intellectual historians, literary theorists, and those interested in western Marxism, popular culture, Friedrich Nietzsche, and the intersection of French and German thought will find this book both appealing and challenging.


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Product Details

• Paperback: 576 pages
• Publisher: Duke University Press (July 1996)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0822317192
• ISBN-13: 978-0822317197
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 5.7 x 1.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.6 out of 5 stars See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #1,038,115 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Trouble w/ Nietzsche, November 18, 2001

By	"ateliermp" (New York, New York) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Nietzsche’s Corps/e: Aesthetics, Politics, Prophecy, or, the Spectacular Technoculture of Everyday Life (Post-Contemporary Interventions) (Hardcover)

Waite's book illustrates a series of "problems" with Nietzsche and Nietzschean-ism: 1/ The Big Lie; 2/ The Double Code; 3/ The Master/Slave Thing; 4/ The So-Called Secret Agenda; 5/ The Will to Power; 6/ The Hellenic Thing; and 7/ The Proto-Postmodernism. It avoids 8/ The Migraines and the Pain, a subject belaboured by Pierre Klossowski in Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle (1969).

An initial reading of both Geoffrey Waite's masterful tirade against the Nietzscheans, Nietzsche's Corps/e, and Pierre Klossowski's (in)famous Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle suggests damning evidence of a misappropriation of Nietzsche (most tellingly by poststructuralists and the Left). Waite points to a very famous symposium, held in July 1972 at Cerisy-la-Salle (Normandy) and attended by the illuminati of the French structuralist-poststructuralist camp (Derrida, Nancy, Klossowski et alia), as the time and place that Klossowski first 'broadcast' his idea of the "secret" Nietzsche.

Waite's book is a demolition of this edifice constructed by the French illuminati and a denunciation of Nietzsche Himself by way of a high-rhetorical romp through the drug-like nature of Nietzsche's thought: "Nietzsche is a type of H/Meth, arguably the major type of post/narcotic 'quiver between history and ontology'." Waite is quoting Avital Fonell's "Our Narcotic Modernity" from Rethinking Technologies (1993) and setting the stage for his investigation of how Nietzsche's writings insinuate themselves into consciousness without necessarily being processed by the rational vectors of the brain. Waite's premise is that Nietzsche indeed, pace Klossowski, encoded a subliminal message into his work. The Genealogy of Morals (1887) and The Gay Science (1882) - plus Thus Spake Zarathustra (1883-85) - are the principle examples of this narcotic prose style.

Perhaps the most rewarding portion of Waite's book is the section "Nietzsche's Esoteric Semiotics", wherein he takes on Klossowski's reading (and therefore the structuralist-poststructuralist camp en masse) and goes about the ravishing analysis of the so-called secret agenda. Nietzsche, it would seem, is the true avatar of postmodernism (nihilism and/plus relativism) and purposely buried his message in the paradoxical, ironic posturing of his works. His message is, in Waite's reading, proto-deconstructivist and attempts to condition all possible futures. Nietzsche has become second nature to our collective postcultural selves - essentially self-deconstructing selves - underwriting almost every discourse that pretends to demolish power in the name of heterogeneity. Perhaps Waite is at his best when he is positing what has been lost; i.e., a possible communism and/or a possible utopian project called enlightenment. Nietzsche, in other words, demolished all pretexts that might underwrite such an agenda.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Most Frightening Question that Can't be Asked, April 8, 2005

By	scale of the jester "scale of the jester" (Cleveland, Ohio USA) - See all my reviews

Waite sets us up for a full explication/penetration of the most destructive Nietzsche virus yet imagined. It should be asked, however, whether he is truly trying to destroy/discredit Nietzsche/anism or create/make stronger the very virus he discovers/invents. This question may not be asked, that of the author's intention, as it pertains to Nietzsche or to Waite. Waite makes writing/reading into a psychotic activity. More frightening is that even my own attempt to discredit Waite's reading only makes stronger, or increases the power of it.

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A Promissory Note That Will Likely Never Be Made Good, July 23, 2006

By	Joseph Martin "pomonomo2003" (NJ, USA) - See all my reviews

This book is hands down the most intelligent left-wing book on Nietzsche in existence! Waite correctly dismisses the playful postmodern Nietzsche of dance and mask worshipped by soi-disant intellectuals and thus gets far closer to the heart of Nietzsche's purpose than they ever do. Waite is unafraid to ask the question who should rule. Also, unlike virtually all 'leftish' Nietzschean commentators Waite is very familiar with the esoteric nature of Nietzsche's writings. He has married the politico-philosophical esoteric readings of Leo Strauss with the revolutionary ideals of Marxism and has given us the only left reading of Nietzsche that is worth reading twice. It now seems, ten long years after the publication of this book, that this marriage between Marxism and esotericism is going to produce no heirs. Which is a pity; I would very much like to have seen a comparison of the dialectical method and the esoteric method that is not simply a hatchet job. By that I mean I would very much like to have seen a study that compares esoteric and dialectical thought written by someone who is adept -and recognized as such by all practitioners- in both these extraordinary philosophical methods. ...But it now seems likely that this will never be. Why?

I would begin to answer that question by noting how remarkable it is that the none of the earlier reviews of this extraordinary book even mentioned Leo Strauss. But, as anyone who has read this book knows, the Straussian understanding of philosophical texts is crucial to Waite's argument. So why this silence among reviewers? One of the problems, if not the main problem, is that in a propaganda war one is at pains to either downplay or ignore the acute contributions to thought of ones enemies. The danger, intelligently alluded to in an earlier review, is that rather than making 'Nietzscheanism' weaker, all Waite has done, by making Nietzsche seem so intelligent and interesting, is make him stronger. In a similar manner and for similar reasons, much of the left would rather ignore Strauss, or excoriate him, rather than present him in an intelligent manner.

Now, these are tactical issues that I do not pretend to be competent to judge, but I will point out that all tactical concerns are temporary and local. If the Marxist-esotericism that Waite here pioneers is a genuine contribution to thought (i.e., if both the esoteric reading of texts à la Leo Strauss and Marxist dialectic are indeed genuine contributions) then it would be sheer madness to ignore either Waite or Strauss. It was Merleau-Ponty, I believe, who once observed quite correctly, in the heat of a similar ideological confrontation, that 'we must not leave our enemies any good ideas'. If Merleau-Ponty is correct in this, that it is always a long-term strategic mistake, for what is at bottom momentary tactical considerations, to ignore genuinely intelligent contributions of enemies then Waite's contribution has been foolishly ignored by the left. But if you believe that long-term strategy is trumped by tactical concerns than Waite's book, regardless of the accuracy of his esoteric reading of Nietzsche, must be ignored.

For myself, a mere observer of this conflict, I continue to hope for a confrontation and/or dialogue between the two greatest 'schools' of political philosophy - the dialectical and the esoteric - that is rigorous, critical and informed. ...But who ever really gets what they want?